“Blue Light” creating capacity for nothing (2007)

Too bad all businesses aren't this easy to fix ;x

I agree with the flip side point. I like to occasionally make a slide deck myself, or do little bit of computer graphics or audio processing, and I appreciate having the capability at my disposal.

But my point is slightly different. It's not that today, more people have cars, but are much more likely to drive themselves to a stupid place. It's that cars - particularly in the United States - very quickly stopped being a tool that empowers the owner, and became a necessity that's required to interact with the society: with cars being accessible enough, architecture and businesses evolved to compensate. For many, this just means they're forced to endure hours of traffic every day. Is this better than before cars were ubiquitous?

Also, the dream of self-driving cars isn't motivated just by the safety argument, but as much - if not more - because a self-driving car is a chauffeur for the masses. It won't let you skip the traffic, but at least it won't be a complete waste of life.

Another example: every self-service website or app - ticket purchase, food ordering, government form - is replacing what used to be a human interaction. In person, over the phone, or (for a brief period of time) over e-mail. This has some benefits, but one major loss is that you're now limited to a dumb (and often broken) form streamlined for machine processing, where previously you'd be interfacing with a person - so good luck if something breaks, or you have some custom need. Plus, self-service sites very quickly become time-negative: with a person on a phone, you can describe what you need in high-level terms. You don't have to search, explore, read FAQs, and type so much stuff.

What makes this into a problem is that you don't have a choice here - self-service systems are cheaper, they justify cutting human-level support to minimum. Most companies still offer you a phone number to call, but instead of quickly reaching a competent human, you're forced to endure an automated system designed to tire you out, increasingly often featuring a broken "AI" voice assistant, that is only ever good at one thing: keeping you from reaching a human. And then, half the time, the human consultant can't do anything because "the computer says 'no'".

(Note how the same companies that make you suffer through an hour of Muzak and "smart" "AI" "assistant" when you call them, will then have a nice, pleasant, real human cold-call you, to upsell you something that's usually a bad deal for you. It's clear what's driving all those "helpful" technologies: company operating expenses.)

And over the past few years, and particularly in the past few weeks (i.e. since ChatGPT was released), people talk so much about using language model AIs to interface with services and technology - mostly without realizing that what they're asking for is a cheaper, inferior form of having a person on the other end of a phone/chat.

> A factory is always bottlenecked by something, sales if nothing else

I don't feel like that's a very good conclusion.

If a good chunk of your processes have roughly the same capacity, and they're all running at that capacity, you don't have anything I would call a bottleneck.

The problem is it's not really a good story to tell, because this leads people, who might not know any better, to later in life recount to some welder friend(s) they happen to know, about how the article's creator was the guy who worked out welders needed TAs ... or one fabrication welding business needed TAs. It's better not to make things up, or use really really incredulous examples, that may lead people to unwittingly embarrass themselves.

It's almost like a story where the genius works out the boss needs a secretary.

When it comes to inventing stuff, important points are often overlooked.

Imagine if the same sort of story recounted a company with a 9 to 5 office where 100 people worked solely at their desktop computer station back in the days of W98 or XP doing whatever it was they did. The guy observes when people arrive for work they're not productive because the first five minutes their system was booting and virus checking. There's over 8 hours of lost production so it's worthwhile to hire an additional low paid casual worker for minimum award, with the minimum required hours for casual (here it's iirc it's been around four hours a day,) to arrive a couple hours beforehand to ensure all systems are running so workers can start working immediately when they walk through the door. Clearly that sounds right, but most here would know, in practice, for many workers, output would not increase substantially. The nuance is in the finer details.

He’s not taking welding gear off and then re-donning it 50 times a day, for starters.